Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Fred Zinnemann | Behold a Pale Horse

If
you can accept Gregory Peck as a Spanish Civil War hero, Anthony Quinn as a
dark-hearted Spanish fascist, Mildred Dunnock as a dying Spanish mother, Omar
Sharif as a French priest, and the young Italian child actor Marietto Angeletti
as the son of a Spanish Republican—and that’s a lot of “ifs”—then Fred
Zinnemann’s 1964 film, Behold a Pale
Horse is not half-bad.

Just in case his audience had forgotten
the Spanish Civil War which brought Franco to power—and evidently, based on the
financial failure of this film, his audience had—Zinnemann begins the work with
documentary photos that recount some of the horrible details of the war before zeroing
in on a long line of Republicans being forced to leave their country. One of them, Manuel Artiguez (Peck) turns back to
Spain at the very last minute, as his colleagues shout “Where are you going,
Manuel. The war is over.” For reasons we never quite discover, for Artiguez it
clearly hasn’t ended, and he remains a thorn in the side of the fascist Captain
Viñolas (Quinn), for years after.

By the time we next see him, however,
Artiguez has finally crossed the border and is now living as an older recluse
in the small French town of Pau. There a young boy, Paco (Angeletti), the son
of another war hero, visits him, hoping that Artiguez will return to Spain to
avenge his father’s death. At first, Artiguez rebuffs the child’s request. But,
coincidentally, in the town that Viñolas controls, Artiguez's mother lays dying in
the hospital.

Paco knows the hospital, wherein his
father ended his life, well; and, accordingly, the two plot how Artiguez might
be able to sneak in to visit her. About to die, however, the mother—who hates
the clergy, but has heard that one hospital priest, Father Francisco (Sharif),
is about to travel with a group of other priests to Lourdes—knowing that he will
have to stop a Pau on the way, asks that he visit her. She asks Francisco to
pass on a letter to her son and tell him not to come back, since she will be
dead.

The film, accordingly, now shifts in an
entirely different direction. Since Artiguez is out when he attempts to visit, Francisco
leaves the mother’s message with the boy, who still desiring revenge, tears it
up and destroys it. But when Paco recognizes another visitor to Artiguez—come with
a message that his mother still lives—as a traitor, he tells Artiguez about the
priest’s visit.

One of the longest scenes in this film,
accordingly, takes place in Lourdes, as the two attempt to track down Francisco.
Certainly, these are beautifully filmed scenes which, taken together, create a
sense of drama, but it seems to lead in the other direction in which we know
the narrative must eventually take.And
when they finally track down the priest, confirming the mother’s death and, by
implicating Artiguez’s smuggler friends association with Vinolas, our Republican hero
has absolutely no reason any longer to return home. Even his enemies cannot
comprehend “why he has come back.” And certainly the viewer has no clue except
that he’s been described as a hero, and that’s what heroes do! Yet our hero's
actions, this time around—particularly since he has no longer any need to visit
hospital and knows it’s a trap—make utterly no sense. Artiguez manages to shoot a
few soldiers, but is quickly killed, seemingly for other reason that he has
come back to Spain once too often.

Zinnemann, as always, is a capable
filmmaker, and this work has a great deal of black-and-white beauty, reminding
one a bit of the great black-and-white Civil War photography. But the story,
based on a novel by Emeric Pressberger, has completely lost its urgency, and
rationality is upended, apparently, by an emotional hatred of Franco and his
thugs. It is almost as if Artiguez doomed himself to die. Although Zinnemann
has almost always worked with good actors, he generally is too careful and predictable
in his films to take the chances of another highly artful director like Alfred
Hitchcock. In this mid-career work, we begin to see that his artfulness has
begun to dominate over the urgency the logic of cinematic acts. Only two years
later, in A Man for All Seasons, he
has turned to heavy costume theatricalism, and by the time he filmed Julia in 1977 he had apparently come to
see filmmaking as simply a string of events.